Idaho Sane Central
This is just a note to the sane ones left in America that not all of Idaho has gone the way of the dodo. Some of us remember a state that used to understand that it benefits mightily from federal revenue in the form of farming and ranch subsidies, roads and bridges, and assistance in marketing lumber and mining products world wide. The madness sweeping the nation is based on the false notion that you can create and maintain a "no government" condition. "No government" amounts to a political vacuum and, since we know nature abhors a vacuum we also know that "something" will fill it. There are really only two political systems known to man, ( three if you count chaos) : democrarcy in some form or totalitarianism in some form. Since the Republican Party is busy dismantling democracy in the states we know what form they favor.. I believe that most of the tea party people have been intentionally duped into believing that the Republican party is " on their side". They are in for a horrible awakening. Most of the philosophy underpinning the Tea Party movement is rooted in the desire to effectively end taxation. Republicans have preyed upon this sentiment. What the tea people do not seem to grasp is that even if taxes were at zero this means nothing without meaningful employment. If taxes are at zero and your income is also at zero you are not better off. The monied class is using this sentiment as a lever to lower wages and dismantle basic workers rights. The plan is to provide jobs alright, low wage, zero benefit jobs. In the world they are trying to create corporate profitability is accomplished by breaking the worker. The unintended consequence of this strategy is that it kills the consumer. Every aim to sell something can only be supported by the capacity to buy something. If you kill the capacity to buy you also kill the capacity to sell. This is the simple, sound logic behind an egalitarian approach to economics. A progressive tax structure was designed to accomplish one thing: relative balance in the economic equation. Balance improves the economic condition of the entire structure. Each party holds views that contain a grain of truth. To see these grains is to be able to identify with and understand the philosophical and practical merits of any particular grain, without mistakenly taking a grain of truth as the entire picture. Extremism in all it's forms is the result of taking a grain of truth as the whole picture. Henry Ford said, "I have to make sure that the people who build my cars can afford to buy my cars." This succinct expression of economic balance is sorely missing in our modern political discourse. I want to say this to my republican and tea party friends: when everyone is doing pretty well then harder workers do better than average. This is simple to grasp. And so our collective task is to figure out how to ensure that the average guy or gal is doing pretty well. the form of government that has done the best job of actualizing this condition is democracy, not totalitarianism or chaos. The baby we may end up throwing out with the bath water is us. Stephen D. Bruno Hayden, Idaho